Western technology companies' view of China as the biggest pool of potential customers ever is looking less accurate than ever, after the Chinese government called for the formation of up to eight super-companies through mergers and acquisition by 2015.

Japanese IT giant and long-time Sparc partner with Sun Microsystems and now Oracle has let slip the details on its "Athena" line servers based on its own sixteen-core Sparc64-X processors, which bear the same code-name inside Fujitsu. And it looks like Oracle is going to be reselling them, too.

Lenovo CFO Wong Wai Ming says the company is actively pursuing ways to improve its position in the mobile device market, spurring speculation that the Chinese firm may be planning to cozy up with Research in Motion – or even swallow it whole.

Mean time between failure wonks take note: The Opportunity rover launched in 2003 and expected to survive 90 days on Mars today racks up nine years of continuous operations on the red planet. That's 3195 days longer than first planned.

A coalition of activists, privacy organizations, journalists, and others have called upon Microsoft to be more forthright about when, why, and to whom it discloses information about Skype users and their communications.

De Vere hotels had legacy systems, systems that needed updating but, most of all, it had lots of servers doing different things. Having grown by acquisition, it needed to consolidate if it wanted to realise its plans for customer service. It did this using a private cloud created by ANS Group, based on NetApp's FlexPod. At 11:00 GMT today, you can hear the story of how it succeeded from Studio Reg.

For reasons too mundane to express, the location at which I have been currently working comprises two adjacent but separate open-plan areas conjoined by a small office occupied by the departmental boss.

Scientists have announced that sperm production in young chaps in south-east Spain has fallen 38 per cent in the last decade, and is heading towards the "danger level" where it might prejudice conception.

As the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team continues to advance inexorably on various front towards the launch of our Vulture 2 spaceplane, we've taken a bit of time to look back at our REHAB experiment.

Amazon bought text-to-speech company IVONA systems on Wednesday, the online book-floggers have announced. The acquisition fuelled rumours that Amazon, the quietest member of The Gang of Four, is planning a rival to Apple's talking assistant Siri.

BBC iPlayer turned five at Christmas, and the Corporation reported some pretty impressive usage statistics as it did so. While iPlayer is something of a juggernaut in the IPTV world, it’s only relatively recently made the leap from PC to living room and connected devices such as smart TVs and set-top boxes.

Scores of programmers uploaded their private cryptographic keys to public source-code repositories on GitHub, exposing their login credentials to world+dog. The discovery was made just before the website hit the kill switch on its search engine or, more likely, the service collapsed under the weight of curious users trawling for the sensitive data.

A pulsar that randomly and without warning dramatically changes its pattern of radio wave and X-ray emissions has surprised a team of astronomers, who wrote that it "challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories".

Twitter's public spat with Facebook continued on Thursday when Mark Zuckerberg's free content ad network appeared to have cut off access to video-sharing app Vine's "find people" function - which allowed Viners to ferret out their Facebook mates. The abrupt shutoff came just hours after the micro-blogging site bought video-sharing tech from the startup.

New research produced by a Norwegian government project, described as "truly sensational" by independent experts, indicates that humanity's carbon emissions produce far less global warming than had been thought: so much so that there is no danger of producing warming beyond the IPCC upper safe limit of 2°C for many decades.

Boeing's flagship fleet of 787 Dreamliner aircraft will be grounded for the foreseeable future after a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the cause of two battery fires had yet to be found, and that Japanese investigators are similarly baffled.

If you squint real hard and tilt your head a little bit, you can see the difference between this year's fourth quarter at Juniper Networks and the quarter it turned in a year ago as 2011 came to a close.

In the latest chapter in the ongoing global patent litigation between Apple and Samsung, the South Korean company has asked a local court to grant it access to the source code to iOS 6, claiming that only the code will tell whether Apple infringed its patents.

Programmers often talk about writing "beautiful code," but computer scientist Ramsey Nasser has taken that idea to new lengths by developing the first programming language that uses Arabic script for its source code.